One day after the horrific mass shooting at a Christian private school in Nashville by a transgender-identifying shooter, Amazon leadership alerted its staff that it “remains in solidarity with our LGBTQIA+ employees, customers, and communities.”
Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s vice president of so-called global diversity, equity, and inclusion, posted the internal message, only accessible to staff, explaining “the last several weeks have been challenging, to say the least, as we continue to see disheartening news in the media.” On behalf of the e-retailer, she offered the company’s “support and solidarity during this period of apprehension and uncertainty.”
Police identified the 28-year-old shooter and noted she was transgender-identified. Though law enforcement has thus far refused to release her manifesto, bucking the trend of quickly releasing these kinds of documents after shootings, there has been reason to suspect gender identity played at least some role in the motive after Nashville Police Chief John Drake revealed she held “resentment” for attending The Covenant School.
Amazon’s message was tasteless in the aftermath of a targeted school shooting that killed three 9-year-old children and three staff — all Christians. But Amazon joined a growing chorus of voices pretending transgender people, not Christians, were the actual victims of the mass shooting.
Suddenly, the identity-obsessed left refused to fixate on or in some cases even mention gender identity in connection with the shooting. When leftists do mention the shooter’s transgender identity, it’s to either justify the violence or present the community as under assault from religious conservatives, which is the very message that may have inspired the mass shooting to begin with.
CBS News executives prohibited staff from reporting the shooter is transgender “as it has no known relevance to the crime,” according to a leaked memo. Instead, they were ordered to “move on to focus on other important points of the investigation, community and solutions.” In the two days following the mass shooting, CBS Evening News omitted that detail from its reporting, according to Fox News. Its approach is in line with a recommendation from the Poynter Institute, which recommends ignoring gender identity, including the use of pronouns, complaining that, “Both news and entertainment media have contributed to the inaccurate characterization of trans people as dangerous and unhinged.”
When it’s a white police officer shooting a black suspect, CBS News and other left-wing outlets either directly frame coverage around the race of the officer or unnecessarily add it as a detail. When a black suspect appears to be the clear guilty party attacking officers, CBS News omits race altogether. When the focus is on race it’s to feed a preferred narrative that racist white cops hunt innocent black Americans. It doesn’t matter if that fiction creates tension and division between black communities and cops because it helps radical leftists reach a political goal to defund and ultimately abolish the police. And the media narrative around transgender people is that they’re the victims.
When ABC News’ Terry Moran framed the massacre, he implied the innocent Christians had it coming. The shooting occurred in the aftermath of legislation passed by the Tennessee state legislature, he said, including “a bill that banned transgender medical care for minors, as well as a law that prohibited adult entertainment, including male and female impersonators after a series of drag show controversies in that state.” This is a not-so-subtle way to say the violence may have been justified. Even NBC News joined the victim-swapping in reporting, “Fear pervades trans community amid focus on Nashville shooter’s gender identity.” No such concern was offered to the Christian community.
The Imaginary Genocide
Corporate media focused much of their coverage on guns, eschewing the only other issue they frequently cite for inspiring violence: escalating rhetoric and fear-mongering. If the shooter wore a MAGA hat, we’d suffer endless media screeds about Trump’s violent rhetoric. Somehow, the Nashville shooter’s mass murder escaped that treatment despite, for months, the left warning the transgender community that religious conservatives were coming for them and constant references to “transgender genocide.”
On MSNBC, Ali Velshi and transgender journo-activist Imara Jones referenced Nazi Germany, claiming a Florida law protecting minors from genital mutilation was actually a “road test for authoritarianism,” and arguing, “This is a prototype, just like the early 1930s were in Germany.”
Democrat State Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh of Nebraska cited the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to tell transgender people that the state was inching closer to committing genocide because some legislation barred biological boys from competing against biological girls in sports. Activists with the group Stop Trans Genocide participated in Boston’s Transgender Day of Resistance March over the weekend to reportedly protest an imaginary “transgender genocide.”
Fed a steady diet of histrionics falsely portraying legislation to protect children as the religious right seeking to erase all transgender people, one might reasonably worry the messaging could inspire violence. Indeed, transgender Americans are already taking up arms to protect themselves from the nonexistent threat.
Violent Radicalization from the Left
On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” days before the mass shooting, I discussed an NPR report featuring terrified transgender News Hampshirans who bought firearms in case white supremacists suddenly attack them. They were scared into thinking their lives were in danger. Carlson observed, “it does seem like they’re [the media and politicians] trying to whip people into an unjustified frenzy and then tell them to buy guns. That’s not reassuring, I don’t think.”
But the left wasn’t interested in this conversation about rhetoric. Instead, they leaned into the same fearmongering that may have concerned the Nashville shooter, resulting in a near-parody chyron during MSNBC’s “Reid Out” that read, “Transgender shooting suspect sparks outrage on the right.” Well, yes — yes, she does.
MSNBC columnist Noor Norman declared it’s “hateful rhetoric” like Carlson’s that is “terrorizing the trans community.” Norman had the temerity to suggest “ironically, it is precisely this kind of rhetoric Carlson shared, which targets and vilifies entire groups of people, that will increase the likelihood of this type of violence, in lieu of a ban on assault weapons.”
Washington Post columnist Fenit Nirappil offered the same uninspired commentary. He, too, blasted conservatives for “anti-trans” rhetoric, proclaiming, “attempts on the right to connect violence to transgender people come even though transgender people are rarely the perpetrators of mass shootings, which are overwhelmingly carried out by cisgender men, according to criminal justice experts.”
It’s certainly true that transgender mass shootings are exceptionally rare, which is all the more reason to highlight the anomaly and discover the motive. But it also ignores a recent study in Frontiers in Psychiatry. Researchers found that “Transgender and gender diverse students reported higher support for VR [violent radicalization]” during the pandemic. Both myself and independent journalist Andy Ngo also observed a disproportionate number of transgender Antifa thugs willing to commit violence for their political cause.
It’s still unclear if gender identity played a role in the shooting, but given the context in which the shooting occurred, it’s reasonable to wonder. And one transgender shooter doesn’t mean all transgender people are dangerous — though that’s the logic of voices on the left.
They refuse to discuss the Nashville shooter the way they tackle right-wing or police violence because they know what that kind of framing can do to communities. They intend to demonize conservatives and the police. If they treated the Nashville shooter the same way, they know it would inadvertently telegraph to the audience that transgender people can be mentally ill, even dangerous. Their silence on this issue exposes their intent when tackling stories that feed their narrative.
